The O'Brien Press looks forward as it celebrates its 50th anniversary

The O’Brien Press is going great guns celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, including a big knees-up at this November’s annual Irish Publishers Conference and re-releasing Éamonn MacThomáis’ Me Jewel and Darlin’ Dublin, the first book the company published, and its first bestseller.

That title was written in Mountjoy Gaol, where MacThomáis, the editor of Sinn Fein’s An Phoblacht magazine, was incarcerated for allegedly being an IRA member. In a way, it reflects The O’Brien Press’ founding ethos of courageous, groundbreaking publishing, which still underpins the business to this day. Take its upcoming autumn releases, which include Patsy Peril and Deirdre Nuttall’s Swimming Upstream, an eco-manifesto to save the Atlantic wild salmon. But let’s not overegg this crusading aspect, as it has a wide and diverse portfolio: a big title for Christmas is certain to be influencer and comedian Enya Martin’s tongue-in-cheek “survival guide” to modern female friendships, One for the Girlos. 

Yet m.d. Ivan O’Brien admits that the 50th celebrations are bittersweet, as they come less than two years after his father, company founder Michael O’Brien, died unexpectedly. The younger O’Brien has been running the family firm for more than 15 years, but his father remained a significant player in the business. 

O’Brien says: “In some ways, [the 50th] marks the transition period from dad dying very suddenly, and the company filling in the gaps and reshaping, which is not something you can do overnight. Thankfully, the company culture was always this kind of weird amalgam of creator/founder/dictator with being really democratic. He was like the bull in the china shop, and I was the boring reality guy. So, the past couple of years have been about realigning relationships and roles. When the bull is gone, you don’t need the reality guy. So my role has to change, and I have to be a bit more disruptive.”

It must be said that the “boring reality guy” had been reshaping the Press—which now has 17 in-house employees and is the second-biggest indigenous Irish publisher—and the past 12 months have been one of the strongest commercially in the company’s history.

One of the biggest changes in the past decade, and particularly in the past four years, is the ramping up of the children’s list, which now accounts for 50% of revenue. Indeed, seven of O’Brien’s top 10 books through Nielsen BookScan’s Irish Consumer Market this year came from the kids’ side, led by Alan Nolan’s World Book Day title The Curious Case of the Irish Yeti, Méabh McDonnell’s middle-grade fantasy Into the Witchwood, and the latest in Gerry Daly and Erika McGann’s Puffling picture books. 

O’Brien says: “Ten years ago, we were looking at our children’s list, saying: ‘Does this really make commercial sense?’ But it’s changed and Covid led to a major shift towards its commercial viability, particularly in picture books. So we moved to produce a larger amount of kids’ books and invest in sales after the pandemic to non-trade outlets.”

Underpinning the children’s list is a search for books and authors that can really backlist. O’Brien says: “As opposed to the book trade, which demands rapid turnover, the outlets on the more tourist side will keep selling a book for multiple years—like Nicola Colton’s A Dublin Fairytale—which is great; in a market our size, it’s essential.

“But on the more general side, we simply can’t do a picture book that will sell well for six weeks and then disappear. It’s not tenable. They need to have legs. With books like the Puffling series or Fox & Son Tailers by Paddy Donnelly—who is an absolute star—they are just so damn good that they will sell at home and abroad and hold their place on the shelves for years.”

It was more or less assumed that O’Brien would join and eventually run the company, though he explored other avenues, including studying physics, which gave him “a bunch of silly letters after my name”—he has a BA in theoretical physics from Trinity and a PhD in astrophysics from the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. It was not a planned succession, he notes, like some of his indie publisher second or third-generation contemporaries such as Gill c.e.o. Ruth Gill or Kogan Page m.d. Helen Kogan, both of whom gained experience at other publishing houses with a view to overseeing the family firm.

Dad was like the bull in the china shop, and I was the boring reality guy. When the bull is gone, you don’t need the reality guy. My role has to change

O’Brien’s formal start date was January 1997, after completing his PhD and spending a year in Australia at a tech firm. That tech experience fed into his first big project for the company, building its transactional website. (“We launched in the UK and Ireland months before Amazon.”) 

In addition to running the Press, O’Brien is a well-known figure in the trade, taking up cross-industry posts such as president of Publishing Ireland on two occasions (most recently in 2023 to earlier this year), and he is currently chair of the Dublin Book Festival and on the board of the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency.

The Press also runs an annual Bookseller of the Year Award; the 2024 winner and 30th recipient of the prize was Emma Shannon from Dubray Books, Cork. 

So, O’Brien has some views on the hot-button issues in the trade. One of the biggest is the imminent launch of Amazon.ie. He says: “I think everyone already buys from Amazon, and the book-buying experience from amazon.co.uk to Ireland is pretty seamless. The one significant impact it might have is the logistics of getting books from Ireland into availability on amazon.co.uk is farcically long: about a fortnight, which is just absurd. I would fully expect that when it starts using the Irish warehouse, that will reduce to a few days, and so the in-stock availability and the delivery times will take a dramatic leap forward.

“But will it make an enormous difference to the amount of books that people buy on Amazon in Ireland? I’m not so sure. 

“Look, I don’t like the fact it’s happening. But the big gripe I’ve had with Amazon over the years is that if you’re Irish, you don’t see Irish stuff on Amazon. And that should change if you go to Amazon.ie—you should see more Irish stuff if they add a little bit of human to the generic algorithm. Therefore, it should give a little bit more presence to our stuff for our customers. So it’s not wholly bad.”

A half-century anniversary is a time to look back. There is some weighty family history but also the unique legacy of a publisher with commercial ambitions underpinned by a founding socialist ethos. But there is, too, an inevitable future-casting with an obvious question: will O’Brien’s children take over?

He laughs: “I won’t say absolutely no, but knowing who they are, I really doubt it. Well, my daughter, possibly.

“But The O’Brien Press will continue to be independent. It will continue to be exceedingly democratic. It will continue to publish Irish stories for Irish and international readers of all ages. But we are a very mission-driven company. So we straddle a line between that and being commercial enough to keep going and make a small profit. But, really, it’s more about the mission than the money.”